Like the year itself, 2025 in cinema was a chaotic mess with some truly great and inspired movies, and a whole heaping helping of immediately forgettable fluff. The latter of those made up more than half the list of 55 new release films I saw in 2025. Outside the top twenty or so, I’ll never see the rest of those movies again in my life.
Horror had a hell of a year after the genre’s third-act problem plagued 2024. Nearly half the films on my top ten would be classified as horror in the classic Blockbuster Video sense of the genre, and two additional horror films that once occupied my top ten during the year were Companion and Final Destination: Bloodlines, which was one hell of a fun time at the movies.
Other films booted off my top ten, often dubbed honorable mentions, include Guillermo Del Toro’s beautiful Frankenstein, Lynne Ramsay’s brutal Die My Love, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ biting Bugonia (I still can’t decide if that ending is scolding us or not).
Since one can’t help but get struck with recency bias when watching a lot of acclaimed movies in a very short span of time, I kept a running list of movies I saw this year and vaguely where they fell in relation to one another. In any other year, any one of those five movies I’ve mentioned so far might have made my list.
I don’t do a worst list, but the five movies at the bottom of my rankings were Happy Gilmore 2, The Black Phone 2, Wolf Man, Flight Risk, and the very worst movie I saw in 2025 was the downright irresponsible “social satire” Eddington.
Films that have been showing up on other critics’ lists that I haven’t seen include Sirât, Blue Moon, and The Testament of Ann Lee. Films that have been showing up on other critics’ lists that are absent from my list include Sentimental Value, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, and Materialists.
Like star ratings or letter grades on reviews, I find rankings so arbitrary. Any film that’s on this list is a film that I loved from 2025, so while I do put a lot of thought into this ranking every year, I might feel otherwise five years from now. But enough of my yakking… let’s boogie!
10. Weapons
While not his debut film, 2022’s Barbarian announced Zach Cregger as an exciting talent to watch in the world of horror, taking a similar approach as many successful genre filmmakers before him by segueing from comedy to horror. His follow-up, Weapons, is an expertly crafted work of homage and originality woven together into a fascinating and crowd-pleasing tapestry. Playing like Magnolia if it were a horror film, Weapons is a multi-layered story of small town modern America where the increasingly real terrors faced by average people rivals anything Hollywood can dish out. But Cregger’s not here to lecture, he’s here to entertain, and with the help of an outstanding ensemble cast he does just that. And my goodness Amy Madigan is incredible, taking over the film in the back half and turning what could and should have been a tone-destroying twist into a devious change of gears. One of the most fun times you could have had at the movies in 2025.
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9. The Rule of Jenny Pen
Much like Weapons, there is a mischievous spirit at play in co-writer and director James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen. The film confronts that greatest of horrors no one wants to speak about, life in a nursing home, but does it with enough cheek to make the horror linger longer. Perhaps Ashcroft’s wisest decision as a director was to let leads John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush go absolute ham, tipping the film comfortably into a gender-swapped hagsploitation classic. It’s an authentic entry in the psycho-biddy subgenre in an era when a certain prolific television creator continuously pushes inauthentic versions of it on us. More of this, please.
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8. It Was Just an Accident
The story behind Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s latest film is almost as compelling as the one he puts on screen in It Was Just an Accident. This frenetic and turbulent film is in the classic vein of a “criminals get in over their head almost immediately,” but the basic decency and humanity of the film’s main characters, particularly leading man Vahid Mobasseri, keeps it feeling fresh and new. The film also features some astonishing one take sequences, the final of which runs for nearly 15 minutes without a single cut. The most brilliant thing about these scenes is that you’ll frequently realize “oh wow, there hasn’t been a cut in a while” as the actors and camerawork emulate the characters’ frantic states of mind. It’s a film that is completely unpredictable, shockingly funny, brutally realistic, and always compelling.
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7. No Other Choice
This is the first time since his 2013 English language debut Stoker that I saw one of South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s films on its initial release, and this has to be one of his best. Transposing a very American story of 1970s corporate greed into a modern Korean landscape where a niche industry like paper production is an even more extinct profession. Star Lee Byung-hun demonstrates not only incredible physical comedy skills, but he elicits real empathy for a character that attempts to act decisively but lacks any real training outside his own vocation. It is by turns hilarious, horrifying, and ultimately depressing as hell to see American values of greed and success at the expense of others seeping into the rest of the world.
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6. 28 Years Later
While I had always liked 28 Days Later, it wasn’t a film I revisited much after seeing it in theaters. I felt I had “gotten the message,” so to speak, in that humans were the real monsters, but the way Alex Garland and Danny Boyle deepened the mythology they created all those years ago reframed both films for me. I find this world they’ve created fascinating, the pop cultural icons that have morphed into something more sinister, while the rest of the world moves on without Great Britain. It has moments of horror, moments of absurdity, and moments of real beauty. It doesn’t play great at a multiplex in the mountains of NC, but I’m so glad Boyle and Garland didn’t feel the need to make a crowd pleasing blockbuster.
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5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
As I mentioned in my review, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the best version of the sort of pulse-racing indie film that’s become very popular of late. Rose Byrne delivers my favorite performance of the year as Linda, a woman whose increasingly terrible decisions in the wake of several personal crises makes her virtually impossible to root for, particularly as you begin to see her from other characters’ perspectives. The thrills aren’t vicarious because they are worst case scenario every single time, but there’s something so relatable about everything she goes through. While everyone else can fall all over themselves for the Marty Supremes of the world, I’ll happily take Byrne and Bronstein’s version of that kind of film’s protagonist.
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4. One Battle After Another
Like all straight white Gen X males, I’m fully in the tank for Paul Thomas Anderson, though his prior outing Licorice Pizza is undeniably among his weakest efforts. Thankfully he followed up that film’s gauzy nostalgia with this prescient modern masterpiece, its finger much more firmly on the pulse that Eddington was frantically attempting to locate several weeks earlier. Leonardo DiCaprio continues finding depth I truly didn’t know he had as an actor, but more than anything, PTA has crafted a showcase for his actresses including the terrific mother daughter combo of Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, as well as the almost-too-subtly-brilliant Regina Hall. It’s got that propulsion and momentum of his earliest work, combined with the refined and restrained aesthetic of his more recent work, aka the best of both worlds.
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3. Superman
As a filmmaker, James Gunn is a lot of things, but no one would accuse him of being subtle. But when the rest of the superhero movie landscape lacks any nuance whatsoever, his unsubtle take on the big blue boy scout is the exact right superhero movie for our current moment. David Corenswet’s earnest take on the title character is a breath of fresh air and proves the perfect person to sell Gunn’s notion that in a world full of hatred and hostility, kindness is the new punk rock. For a character created nearly 90 years ago to retain his relevance in the modern world is nothing short of a miracle—Disney’s Snow White was created the same year as Supes and look how she fared at the box office in 2025. If Zack Snyder’s Superman was a creation born of Ayn Randian self-reliance, Gunn’s is one born of that famous Kurt Vonnegut quote, "God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
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2. Sinners
Wow. Anyone who has seen a Ryan Coogler film, from his electrifying debut Fruitvale Station to his super-earnest Marvel film Black Panther, knows that he is a true talent behind the camera. However, his genre-bending fifth film Sinners is a tour de force in taking an incredibly well-researched musical drama and turning it into a stylish horror film, without ever compromising its ever-prescient social messaging about the plight of non-whites in America. Michael B. Jordan is undeniably one of the most captivating and talented actors working, proving it twice over in this film’s dual leading roles. The cast around him is equally committed, with noted stand-outs being the always great Delroy Lindo and Jack O’Connell, as well as Wunmi Mosaku, who manages to combine the spiritual, the maternal, and the sensual in a way you just don’t see very often. Sinners is by turns sexy, funny, intense, scary, and features the most incredible scene of the year, where music allows us to reach through time and space itself. A true work of blockbuster cinema.
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1. Friendship
I’m not trying to be funny. I’m not trying to make anyone have the worst top ten list they’ve ever seen. It’s hard to take fans of Tim Robinson’s brand of comedy seriously in conversation because they tend to just quote lines from his various programs back at you, as if that’s supposed to be some sort of answer to your question. Bottom line, one could look at this and think that I’m attempting to emulate that oddly specific brand of trolling by saying that this is my number one film of the year, but that’s simply not the case. I’ll be 47 in four months, I’m too old to waste my time that way. Writer/director Andrew DeYoung clearly had his story unlocked by Robinson’s manic and singular brand of comedy, but this film has something to say about men, masculinity, and the ridiculous lengths to which men will go to befriend people they don’t even like. The unique way that the internet has destroyed civil discourse and shattered behavioral norms in an otherwise polite society has never been presented in a more incisive and hilarious way. Robinson’s Craig seems at first like the typical guy just trying to get by, while Paul Rudd’s weatherman Austin presents the image of a man who has it all. Needless to say, this is all projection and these two sad and lonely characters kinda deserve one another, no matter how much they try to convince themselves otherwise. Kate Mara keeps it from being a total boys' club comedy, and is devastatingly funny as a woman at the end of her rope from years of dealing with a man-child. The whole film has an air of barely subdued aggression, threatening to escape through every frustrating encounter with characters who seem to possess little to no common sense. I’ve seen Friendship more than I’ve seen any other film this year (I’ll be embarking on my sixth viewing soon) and it reveals new layers of bizarreness and hilarity every single time.
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